Re: LYNX-DEV Treatment of ­

[William I. Johnston]

I've recently been developing a monospaced font for Macintosh 
users to use in their web browsers that will render all the valid 
HTML entities. This is necessary because the Mac font encoding is
different from other platforms, so usual Mac fonts don't present
eth, thorn, frac14, and other entities.

In doing this, I notice that the ­ entity is mapped to an
en dash in Macintosh fonts, which may explain why some people 
are coding their HTML files to present a space-­-­-space
in order to achieve a wordspaced em dash -- which can also be
presented thus -- in their files.

Reading your thread about &173; encouraged me to develop a web
document to test the behavior of this entity in various browsers.
Point your favorite browser to

http://world.std.com/~wij/shy.html

and see what happens. 

So far, Lynx wins by correctly rendering a break in the long word
as necessary, and suppressing the presentation of all the other
discretionary (soft) hyphens.

I've tested this document on various Macintosh browsers, including
Netscape Navigator 3.01, MS Internet Explorer 3.01, and MacWeb 2.0.
None of them suppresses the soft hyphens, and most of them don't
even break the line, thus failing in two important ways in the
presentation of the &173; entity.

-Will Johnston
 Watertown, MA USA
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